PROLOGUE: BRYCE
I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m not great at geography.
It wasn’t my best subject when I was a kid, and as I got older there just wasn’t much use for it. I never needed to know exactly where Belarus was or if Luxembourg was landlocked or not.
So when someone told me about Starkland, it was no surprise that I had never heard of it.
I’ll never forget that morning. I came downstairs, made some coffee, and then my stepmother cleared her throat.
“Bryce,” she said, “did you know that you’re descended from royalty?”
I nearly choked on my toast.
As it turns out, my father comes from an old royal family in Starkland. Over five hundred years ago, they were kicked out of the country after another family took control, and we never looked back since. Back then we were called the Bismarck royal family, but now we just go by Koch.
My father never talked about Starkland. Apparently having royal blood never much mattered to him. Robert Koch is a practical man, an accountant, kind, and generous. Having obscure royal blood in his veins just never much mattered to him.
Until one day it mattered a lot.
I’ll never know what my father first thought when he saw that letter written on royal stationary. He probably doesn’t even remember. But it was an invitation to return to our ancestral home and to meet the current royal family. Of course, it was an all-expenses paid trip, and so we jumped at it. How could we have known what they really wanted?
It wasn’t like they came out and said it in the letter. Could you imagine? “Dear Robert Koch, we’d like your daughter to marry our reigning monarch because there’s this bitter civil war raging and he needs an heir, so this would be a really great publicity move. Interested?”
Dad would have freaked out.
Fortunately for the Starkland royal cabinet, they didn’t bother mentioning their real motives for inviting us. If they had, none of this would have ever happened.
But they didn’t, and so we went. I’ll never forget stepping off that plane for the first time and seeing Starkland. Vast forests, wide, beautiful rivers, and him.
He was more impressive than the landscape. Christophe Werner von Brunhild the Third, Prince of the Lowlands and the Right King of Starkland, or Trip as I’d later find out everyone called him, stood easily over six feet tall and held himself with that cocky swagger you’d come to expect from a guy at a dive bar, not from royalty. He smirked at me as soon as I made eye contact with him, and that smile sent a jolt running down my spine.
He looked the way I imagined kings should look. Muscular, broad, and handsome, there was that slight stubble on his chin that suggested he was either way too busy to shave or just didn’t give a damn what people thought. Still, there was something off about the way he held himself. I’d expected a rigid and serious man, but instead Trip seemed to regard the whole spectacle with detached amusement.
In only three short days, I’d feel his breath against my neck in the deep darkness of the castle’s interior. His lips would brush my ear and he’d say, “Pretend all you want, Bryce, but we both know what you want. You can’t stop thinking about my hands between your legs. Are you dripping wet already? Let me find out.”
If I could go back and do it all again, I’d warn myself. Standing on that tarmac, I had no clue what was about to happen to me.
If I could, I’d tell myself to turn around and run away. Trip might be royalty, but he’s a royal asshole.
A handsome, cocky, devilish royal asshole. The kind of man that makes me so angry I can barely speak while still absolutely dripping wet.
That’s Trip, layer after layer, all rolled into one deliciously handsome package.
But I didn’t turn around and I didn’t run away. I shook hands and smiled for the cameras just like I was told. When I got to Trip, he leaned forward and whispered into my ear.
“Welcome to Starkland,” he said. “Call me Trip. I can’t wait to see what that beautiful ass looks like in just a pair of panties.”
What happened next changed a lot of lives, especially mine.
BRYCE
Nobody actually tells you not to slap the King.
Nobody said those words. Sure, they tell you to be polite and to smile for the pictures, but they don’t warn you that the current King of Starkland, a young and handsome asshole named Trip, might whisper something dirty in your ear. And in response, you might want to slap him in the face.
They don’t tell you not to do that. So when I wound up and slapped him right in his cocky, attractive face, the crowd went absolutely still.
Nobody moved a muscle. Technically, striking the King of Starkland carried the penalty of death. Or at least that was what I read online later that night.